On Monday, officers of the Pavoverė border guard post of the Vilnius Border Guard Unit of the State Border Guard Service (VSAT), while on duty near the village of Moliai (Švenčionys district) in the border waters of the Neris River, about 30 meters from the shore, noticed a suspicious object. The snowflake-shaped (hexagonal) item was submerged and stuck among aquatic plants and branches.
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Using a service boat, the border guards pulled the item, a metal structure, ashore and transported it to the border guard post.
There, from the cavities of the structure, they extracted 2,250 packs of “NZ Gold” cigarettes wrapped in black polyethylene film with Belarusian excise stamps. The value of such an amount of illegal tobacco, including all mandatory taxes in Lithuania, is 12,397 euros.
A pre-trial investigation has been initiated at the Vilnius Border Guard Unit of VSAT for illegal handling of excise goods, led by a prosecutor from the 2nd Criminal Prosecution Division of the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
For such a criminal offense, the law provides for a fine or imprisonment of up to four years.
The cigarettes brought by the Neris River from Belarus and the “raft” are temporarily stored at the Pavoverė border guard post.
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Border guards have recently rarely encountered this method of transporting Belarusian tobacco. Now the smugglers’ attention is focused on “air mail” – drones and balloons.
Cigarette shipments on the Belarusian side are lowered into the river, the Nemunas, or the Neris, hoping that the current will successfully carry them to the Lithuanian shores. The goal of the smugglers operating here is to quickly pull the cigarettes out of the river and transport them unnoticed by land.
In the cold season, smugglers try to disguise tobacco “rafts” to resemble floating ice floes. They wrap them in white (transparent) polyethylene film or medical gauze, load them with frozen snow, ice, and dirt, and select various construction materials – bricks, concrete blocks, paving stones – to regulate buoyancy. Often, GPS transmitters and remote control calls are attached to these smuggler “rafts.”
Transporting cigarettes through border waters by forming “rafts” or using various constructions and attaching GPS equipment is more intense during the cold season. However, this method has been replaced by air transport of tobacco.
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